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The
‘US’ Profile: Johnny Depp

by Betsy Israel
Photographs by Lance Staedler
US Magazine Number 184
May 1993

Depp
returns in Benny & Joon. And we missed
everything about
him. His tattoos. His cheekbones. His clothes. Well, not his clothes.

Johnny
Depp after laying low for over two years, the wonderfully
unpredictable Johnny Depp bounces back with a bunch of—what
else?—whimsically off-beat roles.

It
is hard to say who’s gotten more press over the years: Johnny
Depp
or James Dean. Or Johnny Depp or the Pope or Johnny vs. Saddam
Hussein or Johnny/Paul McCartney. But we can say, with certainty,
that few celebrities have been so discussed (and far fewer dissected
in both Tiger Beat and Newsweek).
Despite
his recent absence from the tabloids, Johnny Depp, one time teen
idol, still carries a thick file of press clips. In fact, it seems
possible to write about him without actually meeting him, without
doing more than quoting the existing “Johnny” lore
already out
there. A few examples: He has three tattoos (“Betty
Sue” for his
mother on the left arm; “Winona Forever” for his
former fiancée,
Winona Ryder, and an Indian, because he is—as you probably
know—part Cherokee, on the right). He has, standing in his driveway, a
nine-foot-tall fiberglass rooster. He once burned his underwear on
the set of 21 Jump Street (apparently his trailer
hadn’t
been cleaned for some time). He was described by John Waters, the
director of Cry-Baby, Depp’s first
starring feature role, as
potentially “the cutest boy who ever worked in a gas
station.” He
is reputed to once have feared John Davidson, the singer, and to have
had nightmares about Alan Hale Jr., who played the skipper on
Gilligan’s Island.

Wading
through the Depp press collection, one imagines an eccentric grad
student with an occasional attitude problem. Our initial encounter
does little to alter the impression.

Depp
asks that we meet at Barney’s Beanery, an L.A. dive decorated
with
rainbow-striped vinyl seats and pool tables—as if a biker
bar had
been crossed with Howard Johnson’s. One and a half hours
after our
meeting time, Johnny Depp appears. He is dressed in a battered tux
jacket draped over flannel shirt(s) that seem to cover one or more
T-shirts. Unhooked suspenders slap against maroon bell-bottoms slit
up the sides. Hair hangs in his face. He has on what appears to be
combat boots. He yawns.

But
just as unkind words—affected, perhaps rude—start
to make their way around the brain, Johnny Depp shakes his head and
says, almost meekly, “I’m really
sorry. Really, man,
Really.” He will explain. He wants to. And thus, folding down
into
the booth, he offers up an excuse so strange, so sincerely put forth
that it has to be true: “I was in a serious deep
sleep.” He
pauses, lifts a stray hair clump from his eyes and continues.
“I
don’t always get that kind of real relaxed sleep, you know?
Really
deep, you’re just loving it, lying there, a
trance . . . except now I
guess I’ve kind of ruined your day. I’m so
sorry.”

A
waitress brings coffee and Johnny Depp thanks her, as if
she’d just
handed him a $20 dollar bill. Coffee “happening,”
the first of
many Gauloises lit, Johnny Depp tries, more definitively, to explain
himself. “I’ve just been out of the interview loop
for a while,
you know? Press free.”

It
seems that a “press-free” sojourn was earned. As
the star of the
late-Eighties Fox TV series, 21 Jump Street, Depp
possessed
the small-screen power of an Elvis. He typically received 10,000
squealy letters per month (plus the occasional pubic hair). His mail
was stolen as a sacred object. Hyperstimulated thirteen-year-olds
lined up several hours in advance for his appearances. Even after he
quit the show, after he moved on to his real and serious work,
Johnny-mania lingered. To this day traces persist. Called recently,
Betty Sue Depp, Johnny’s mother, intoned into the phone
“I don’t
do interviews! Please!” she then hung up, calling
Johnny’s agent,
who called his publicist, who, learning that Johnny himself had given
out the number, refrained from canceling the interview.

Johnny
Depp, on his own, consistently tries to be polite. He offers
cigarettes, sugar for coffee; he asks considerate questions
(“So,
are you completely weirded being in L.A.?”) But his
impatience with
“the star shit”—and with the
journalists who fuel it—is quickly palpable. “When reporters can’t
think of
what to
report on they look back and find all this other stuff,” he
says,
without a great deal of coaxing. “And then they just keep on
repeating it so it becomes like this stupid game of
telephone.”
Having said this, however—having said anything negative,
about
anyone—Depp retracts his statement. He respects that
people, even
reporters, have their jobs. He doesn’t want to speak about
people
“in an unfair way.”

But
in the case of reporters, he—and his mother and publicist—are
justified. They do tend to get it wrong. Depp is
not a
semiliterate wild man (at least not now at the age of almost-thirty).
He is, on the contrary, shy, prone to uncomfortable
don’t-look-at
me squirming. He can’t imagine why any one would write to
him, “a
mere actor.” (Although if the writer seems
“damaged,” he has
from time to time written back.) He never watches dailies
(“Physically ill. Uh, bad stomach, Get me out of
here”). And he
has “never, ever, ever . . . watched
anything and said,
‘Oh, I was
great . . . Never!’”

Despite
the cheekbones, and the unaffected pout, Johnny Depp was simply not
cut out for teen-dream stardom. He seems far more comfortable in
disguise (today, as the scarecrow of Oz.) He likes to blend in to
observe (today, two fat insurance salesmen sharing a foot-high
hot-dog-platter). He enjoys playing real people. Troubled people. The
unbeautiful.

This
preference helps to explain the Depp resume, a list of credits
regarded by some in the industry as “eclectic” and
by others as a
mystery. First there was a Cry-Baby, the high-camp
parody of
Fifties teen culture. Next, “another blow to the
image,” he
played Edward Scissorhands in makeup so heavy he
was
unrecognizable. This month he’ll be seen in Benny
& Joon, as
a dyslexic who falls in love with a schizophrenic. He has already
completed Arizona Dream, a surreal comedy withJerry
Lewis and Faye Dunaway and What’s Eating Gilbert
Grape, an
adaptation of the Peter Hedges novel about a small-town boy with a
slow-witted brother and a mother who weighs 500 pounds. At the
moment, Depp is preparing to shoot Ed Wood, a Tim
Burton film
about the transvestite director who befriended the aging Bela Lugosi
in Fifties Hollywood.

“For
Benny & Joon, I needed someone who could
play a character
who’s, metaphorically, an angel,” says Jeremiah
Chechik, the
film’s director, “someone who could achieve a real
naïve
innocence that would not come off as foolish . . . I define movie
star
as someone who makes it hard for the viewer to turn away. Johnny is a
star”. But, says Chechik, “he chooses parts based
on personal
and artistic considerations, not ‘What would the public
say?’”

“Hey,”
Depp says, hoping to clarify. “I don’t have an
allergy to leading
man things or kind-of-commercial movies. It just feels good that I
haven’t taken a route that should have been planned out for
me . . . that I could fight with the labels.” He takes a
very long
drag off
his cigarette, an equally marathon tug of coffee, then, because we
are already inside the “career thing” he agrees to
get all the
standard background stuff out of the way. What Depp, with a brief
table-top drum roll, calls “the facts.”

If
you don’t know them already:

He
grew up in Miramar, Florida, where his father, a city engineer, moved
the four Depp siblings (two girls, two boys; Johnny the youngest)
from Kentucky, when Johnny was seven. He had no particular film
heroes as a child, although he liked the TV show,
Hogan’s
Heroes. “I liked the fact that they dug
tunnels,” he says,
“That you could lift up your bed and there was this whole
underground world. I fantasized about tunnels. Once I tried to dig
one in the back yard.”

The
tunnel ended up a mere hole and young Depp sought other escapes. When
he was twelve, his mother, a waitress, bought him an electric guitar
for $25. Johnny took it and “just locked myself in my room
with my
guitar and records for two years.” He emerged an alienated
teenager—but a musical one. He snuck into bars, gigged with local
bands,
launched a precocious (and much-chronicled) run of sex, drugs,
“yeah
and sloppy rock & roll.” At age 16 he dropped out of
high
school and with in a year formed his own band, the Kids. The Kids
became popular: they opened for the B-52’s and Talking Heads
and,
in 1983, they left Florida for Los Angeles and the L.A. club scene.
Depp recalls this time in his life as “hard. Loud. A lot of
drinks.”

But
within six months all that changed. Depp had married briefly to
musician Lori Allison, and Allison was friendly with a young actor,
Nicolas Cage, who suggested that Depp, then twenty, meet his agent.
The agent sent Depp, who had never even seen a script, to read for
Nightmare on Elm Street, and Depp was cast
“as, yes, the
boyfriend.” Of his first acting experience he says:
“I got sucked
into a bed.” He also got paid.
“SAG scale was, like, $1200
a week? That was kind of inspirational in a way.”

Depp
then left the band, did his first interviews (“I felt so
stupid”)
and made a second film, Private Resort, with Rob
Morrow, which
he describes as “a paycheck thing.” His first real
work, as he
sees it, came in Platoon, for which he spent
“two weeks in
the jungle in the Philippines. Just living
there . . . in dirt
holes.”
And putting up with Oliver Stone. “He has a great ability to
piss
you off. Somewhere I understood ‘this is directorial
method.’ But
so much needling to thirty-two guys can really get to you.”

Despite
a much-edited part (he played the translator), Depp began to think of
himself as a professional actor. He studied with Peggy Feury at the
Loft Studio. He read plays and scripts. He turned down a lot of TV
work, including 21 Jump Street. He waited. He
continued, for
some time, to wait. When nothing materialized—and the actor cast
in Jump Street dropped out—Depp reconsidered
the TV job.
And so, for three-and-a-half years, he played tough but lovable
undercover cop Tom Hanson, until, as he put it,
“I’d had enough.
They didn’t want to go anywhere else. I kept saying, how big
is our
jurisdiction? We’re going into these schools. At one point
isn’t
someone going to say, ‘Hey you were in that other
school?!’ How
many years could this happen realistically? They were like it
doesn’t
matter.’”

During
one hiatus, he filmed Cry-Baby. “I had to
find a perfect
teen idol,” says director John Waters. “I went
through a zillion
teen magazines and, well, I just felt there was nobody better than
Johnny. It’s ironic, of course, that it changed things for
him.
That was really the end of the teen idol craze.”

Except
that he continued to receive the usual offers—“The
guntotin’
guy,” as he describes it. “Kiss the girl. Fight a
coupla guys.
Superhero stuff.” And he was still bound, for a season
anyway, to
continue in 21 Jump Street. But Depp had evolved a
very
different vision of himself. And certain directors, Tim Burton, for
one, began to see it. Or at least to perceive in him something
unusual: An ironic sense of humor coupled, oddly, with a childlike
quality.

When
Depp talks about Edward Scissorhands (always as
“Edward”)
he talks a lot about innocents, specifically children and dogs. He
based his “Edward” performance on a dog because
“he (Edward)
reminded me of dogs I’d had. That rapid eyeball doggy thing.
The
unconditional love thing . . . It’s rare
when
you’re able to start
from the ground up that way. Create someone who’s not really
human.” What moved him most was that kids, little ones,
responded
so strongly to it. “Three—and four—and five-year-olds,
they
understood the pain that kind of happens. My youngest niece, she
started calling me Mister Edward!”

A
different waitress interrupts with more coffee. Depp looks around for
the first waitress, his “usual” waitress.
“Well,” says the
substitute, “she just quit.”

“Jesus,”
says Johnny, as if he’d just heard someone died.
“She’s been
here for years.” It is with quiet seriousness that he says,
“That’s
heavy.”

The
Depp residence, up a steep vertical “S” of Canyon
Road, is
defined by its high altitude and, indeed, by its enormous fiberglass
rooster. (“I don’t know,” says Depp, with
a one-shouldered
shrug. “I saw it. I had to have it.”)
There’s a motorcycle, a
Porsche, a Chevy pickup in the garage. Johnny’s sister,
Christi,
“who helps organize my life” makes coffee in the
kitchen. He
shows me his view (“Your basic L.A. combo platter—fog,
smog . . .”)
and his improvements (“I bought these patio chairs”—and then he
points beyond the pool to the house next door, a onetime celebrity
home, where the words, “PISS OFF!” are carved in to
the roof.
“Guy got sick of the lunatics with helicopters, you
know?”

That
said, we take the tour, pausing to admire a yellow electric guitar on
an old couch; two telescopes; a TV the size of a small European car,
although Depp is quick to say that there is no reason to watch
it—nothing on except the “surreal” local access
channels or very
late-night MTV or old movies. “I’m really
fascinated by other
aspects of the culture,” he explains, heading into a small
room
that leads to a staircase. “Just not necessarily the one
we’re
in.”

Nor,
it seems, the planet we are on.

The
Depp house by any decorating standard is delightfully strange. In
every room he’s hung paintings of clowns on fire or
juxtaposed with
skulls. Surrounding them, in frames, are very carefully preserved and
mounted bugs, mostly roaches. “Bugs,” says Depp,
“are so
mysterious. We don’t know how or what they are. They just
are.”

This
remark leads, naturally, to a discussion of Kafka, which leads as do
all his conversations about literature, to Jack Kerouac, author of On
the Road and a Depp boyhood idol. We look at his many framed
photographs of the writer. We look at some others of his mother as a
pretty, dark-haired young woman. Of Vincent Price, as
Edward’s
creator. Unavoidably, in the bedroom, there is a black-and-white shot
of Winona Ryder, tangled in sheets. “Yeah,” says
Depp, glancing
at it. “She’s really pretty. She is.”
Which is his way of
opening and closing a subject he will do anything—talk for
any
length of time about bugs and clowns and Kerouac—to avoid.

“Hey.
I had nothing but bad luck after talking about this stuff,”
he says
heading off in the direction of the coffee fumes. “It became
such a
public thing. Everyone felt like they were either part of it or owned
a part of it that they had somehow gotten the right to ask me about
her.
When you’re in the bathroom, you’re taking a
squirt, and some guy
walks up to you and says, ‘Hey! How’s
Winona?’ I mean, Huh?
You’re there with your Johnson in your hand. It takes
everything,
every inch of strength not to turn around and pee on him!”

Back
in the living room, Depp apologizes for the mini-outburst about
Winona, about privacy, the “star shit.” He offers,
instead, to
discuss anything else—favorite color? Best screen kisser? He
smirks. Pet peeves?

To
be nice, however, he agrees to try and sifts slowly
through a
pile of cassettes on the floor. Even more slowly, it seems, he eases
one—a cut from Arizona Dream—into the VCR.
Then he
free-falls back onto the flannel-covered couch, presses the remote,
looks away as his face fills the screen. Johnny Depp confronted with
Johnny Depp, tries to seem calm. He lights a cigarette to match the
one he has burning in a nearby ashtray. Gets up, sits back down,
paces and then, peering out at the blanched white afternoon sky,
begins to just talk.

“Jerry
Lewis (his costar in the film) is exactly what you’d
expect . . . A
wacky nutty professor guy. Really generous, really warm,” he
says
of the man widely regarded as impossible and sometimes cruel. And
Faye Dunaway, who is reputed to be worse? “Faye has a
specific way
of working. It’s not that she’s a
bitch . . . she’s a
perfectionist.”

“Johnny’s
such a nice boy,” says director Waters. “If I
worked with him
again I’d have to cast him as a serial killer.”

That’s
not precisely the actor’s fantasy role. He’d love,
someday
(somehow) to film On the Road. “I have
that romantic thing
about the whole train yard—cooking beans on a fire . . . Sullivan’s
Travels. You know? he says, which reminds him that he loves
Veronica Lake, who starred in the Preston Sturges film. And W.C.
Fields. Cary Grant. “So many great actors, man.”

He’s
just not entirely convinced that he’s one of them.

The
taped segment ends at last. Depp aims the remote at his face in
freeze frame. Relieved, he lights up and inhales sharply.

“So,
you do wanna know my favorite color?” he asks, walking out to
say
good-bye to his sister. “It is,” he says, pausing,
“cobalt
blue.” He laughs, confesses that it’s not.
“But,” he says,
halfway between the rooster and the “embarrassing”
Porsche. “If
you can’t have a little humor about yourself . . . what
can I say?
You’re fucked.”